Hacker News Reader

Comment by rs186 | Hacker News Reader

Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of this for better adblocking and full control of the browser.

Why would they want AI?

View on HN

On Linux and Windows it is IMO the best browser and it's pretty good on MacOS too, although Safari is still my fave on that platform.

It's stable, got good UI and light on resources. The excellent adblocking is a huge feature.

For the average Joe user, they might want some AI features but most techy users have already got that figured out.

Everything but web games which almost always perform better on chrome. Probably not Firefox’s fault 95% of the time though

I can’t figure out why they couldn’t just fund a first-party extension to add AI features.

Good autoscroll too (the one you invoke by clicking the wheel). It's what made me stick to Firefox during its worst years, 4+ until relatively recently.

It has just the right acceleration curve and properly works inside nested scrollable elements.

World class open source browser, A+ ad blocker, better tab-style tree extension, more free/open extension store, no corporate overload, on and on....

Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D

WebUSB is amazing for trusted computation on TKey platform, i.e. you don't have to trust the browser to load the correct program as the key is always DICE-derived deterministically. The browser is the best thing since sliced bread for running all kinds of programs without having to actually install any of them.

WebUSB is great to that end!

I have used WebUSB exactly once: to use the GrapheneOS webinstaller. I keep a copy of Chromium around and use it about once a year for some kind of nonsense along these lines.

I do, but I also benefit from the fact that Chrome is basically everywhere already, so I use Firefox as my primary browser, and just break out Chrome when I need to flash some devices with ESPHome or something.

After using Chrome for a decade I switched to firefox a few years ago when there was a headline about Google blocking ad blocker. I'm not sure whatever happened to that but I wanted no part in a company even considering it

They went ahead with manifest v3, as a result Firefox (and it's derivs) get full fat adblocking (Ublock Origin) and Chrome gets Ublock Lite which does the best it can with the v3 manifest limitations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com